A new life for a new generation…

Adapted from TS Eliot’s ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’, this “groundbreaking musical” (Daily Express) comes together in a sparkling fusion of music, dance and verse, and has now taken on a new life for a new generation.

CATS, one of the longest-running shows in West End and Broadway history, received its world premiere at the New London Theatre in 1981 where it played for 21 record-breaking years and almost 9,000 performances. The ground-breaking production originally directed by Trevor Nunn and featuring musical staging by Gillian Lynne was the winner of the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Musical. In 1983 the Broadway production became the recipient of seven Tony awards including Best Musical, and ran for 18 years.

Since its world premiere, CATS has been presented in over 30 countries, has been translated into 15 languages and has been seen by more than 73 million people worldwide. Both the original London and Broadway cast recordings won Grammy Awards for Best Cast Album.

The magnificent musical score includes the one of the most treasured songs in musical theatre —‘Memory’, which has been recorded by over 150 artists from Barbra Streisand and Johnny Mathis to Liberace and Barry Manilow.

With universal appeal and an expandable cast of different age groups, the show has not only been presented in theatres, but also in tents in Japan and Korea, an engine shed in Switzerland and school gymnasiums across the USA.

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Awards

8 Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Original Score

2 Laurence Olivier Awards, including Musical of the Year

Evening Standard Award for Best Musical

2 Grammy Awards

Outer Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical

3 Drama Desk Awards

France Molière Award for Best Musical

7 Dora Mavor Moore Awards

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I began setting Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats to music late in 1977, partly because it is a book I remember with affection from my childhood and partly because I wanted to set existing verse to music. In my associations with lyricists it has tended to be the case that once a dramatic story line had been agreed, the lyrics are written to music I compose. I was very curious to see whether I could work the other way round.

Very luckily Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats contains verses that are extraordinarily musical; they have rhythms that are very much their own, like the ‘Rum Tum Tugger’ or ‘Old Deuteronomy’ and although clearly they dictate to some degree the music that will accompany them they are frequently of irregular and exciting metre and are very challenging to a composer.

I wrote some settings in late 1977 which I began performing at the piano for friends, but I never progressed the idea seriously until after I had composed Tell Me On A Sunday. This was performed on BBC TV in the early part of 1980 and I began to think of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as a possible concert anthology that could also be performed on television. With this in mind, some of my settings were performed in the summer of 1980 at the Sydmonton Festival. Valerie Eliot fortunately came to the concert and with her brought various unpublished pieces of verse by her husband; one of these was ‘Grizabella the Glamour Cat’. The musical and dramatic images that this created for me made me feel that there was very much more to the project than I needed the support of another to encourage me to re-work my settings and to see if a dramatic whole could be woven from the delightful verse that I was now to be allowed to develop.

Thus in the late summer I had my first meeting with Trevor Nunn. Soon after Valerie Eliot produced various other uncollected poems, three of which we have incorporated into Cats in their entirety. She also gave us a fascinating rough draft of an opening poem for what appears to have been conceived as a longer book about cats and dogs. This poem was not appropriate for the stage but it inspired us to write a lyric with the same intention of celebrating the supremacy of Jellicle cats. We have been able to include lines from the end of Eliot’s draft poem which now introduce ‘The Naming of Cats’. But what was most thrilling was to find a reference in one of Eliot’s letters to coherent, albeit incomplete structure for an evening; he proposed that eventually the cats were to go “Up up up past the Russell Hotel, up up up to the Heaviside Layer”.

Trevor Nunn, who I discovered has a taste for tackling theatrical problems that most people consider insoluble, set to work immediately with me combing Eliot’s works and we were reminded of the many references to cats in the main body of his writing.

I have enjoyed working on Cats as much as on any show on which I have worked. My gratitude will be undying to Valerie Eliot without whose encouragement the musical could never have taken its present form. Andrew Lloyd Webber